A robust multi-cloud strategy ensures that organisations benefit from the efficiencies of public clouds, like flexibility and scale
It’s a multi-cloud world with organisations making investments across private and public environments. A steady stream of new capabilities and tools are demonstrating the power of cloud computing as they spin up at the edge to manage the massive influx of data generated in real time.
Now, more clouds are rolling in. There are telecom and sovereign clouds and vertical industry clouds that provide support, applications and requirements specific to healthcare, finance, government, retail and even media.
The public sector, too, is steadily increasing its investments in cloud architectures. Take, for example, the Singapore government, which is leading this with plans to spend more than 30 per cent of its 2023 ICT budget on cloud applications developed on the Government Commercial Cloud (GCC) and drive efforts to move 70 per cent of its systems to the cloud by the end of the year.
While this is great news for organisations looking to maximise the value of their cloud investment and meet critical business objectives, it may complicate the multi-cloud landscape. The proliferation of these very specialised clouds can create yet another silo if organisations aren’t able to move data and apps freely between them.
A robust multi-cloud strategy ensures that organisations benefit from the efficiencies of public clouds, like flexibility and scale, and bring these on-premises with the advantages of performance, control, and security.
Less is more…complexity
When building a strategy, some may say the obvious answer is a monolithic cloud approach – pick one platform with one provider and rely on their apps and a small pool of partners.
But this stunts innovation. Closed platforms are the proverbial walled garden in the cloud and developer ecosystem, decreasing integration across the ecosystem and leading to vendor lock-in. While it may seem simple in the beginning, organisations miss out in the long run by limiting themselves to a proprietary set of services that impact their ability to easily access and adopt future industry innovations.
Too often, organisations that invest across multiple clouds and services are left to figure out the disparate pieces independently. On top of this, organisations want a secure multi-cloud infrastructure as they continue to pursue their digital transformation.
According to Dell Technologies’ research, 75 per cent of organisations in Asia Pacific cite the ability to protect multi-workloads across on-premises and public clouds to be among the most important capabilities for enabling hybrid, multi-cloud operations.
Workarounds take time and resources away from innovation and productivity. Organisations want these clouds, apps, platforms and services to work together seamlessly. They want multi-cloud by design, not by default.
But they don’t necessarily want a single service provider – they want a simpler way to securely manage and orchestrate data and apps across multiple cloud environments. While the nirvana state is to get a singular view, a more realistic goal may be to reduce the number of unique siloed tools for cloud management and orchestration to enhance value.
More open, less ego
We see the solution to multi-cloud complexity differently — break down silos and build an open ecosystem that thrives on a wide range of partnerships, collaboration and innovation.
A good example is what the Singapore government is currently adopting. Launched by the Singapore government, the Government on Commercial Cloud platform provides government agencies with a consistent means to adopt commercial cloud solutions offered by cloud service providers with robust cybersecurity measures and systems to protect the data that resides on commercial cloud platforms.
This is to allow government agencies to tap into commercial cloud software to incorporate advanced functionalities into their digital services instead of trying to reinvent the wheel, delivering high-quality government digital services to citizens and businesses.
Multicloud is not just a random collection of public clouds or even those clouds’ loose connections to private clouds. Multicloud is about accessing an ever-expanding set of innovations across clouds and acknowledging that you need the capabilities of the entire ecosystem to deliver modern IT.
That’s where open ecosystems come in. They allow for interoperability and deeper integration across solutions and services – providing greater access to innovation from a variety of providers. This way, the technology not only works, but it also works in the ways organisations really need it to. It has to if we want to unleash data-driven breakthroughs through AI and automation powered by cloud computing.
No single company or innovator will deliver on the promise of technology. Nor should they. That’s what makes the technology industry so incredibly vibrant – relentless innovation that pushes the boundaries of possibilities to solve the world’s greatest challenges.
Source: e27
